The Embarcadero station in San Francisco, where a transfer can require navigating multiple levels and fare types.Credit
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — There is much to relish about the Bay Area, from the intoxicating landscape to the blissful lack of humidity.

One thing is not perfect, though: the daunting nature of the region’s public transportation system, a patchwork of more than 20 operators spread across nine counties and 101 municipalities that have yet to spawn a cohesive map.

As housing costs here continue to escalate, with growing numbers of people moving farther afield in search of affordability, the disjointed nature of the region’s transportation fiefs, each with its own fare structures and nomenclature, has become the topic of increasingly intense debate among transportation policy experts.

A study released this year by SPUR, a Bay Area urban planning and policy think tank, encapsulated much of the public frustration on the subject and has been widely discussed on blogs and in public forums, including one at the venerable Commonwealth Club of California.

The study recommends a variety of changes, from better trip-planning tools to smoother transfers. But there are roughly two dozen transit agencies in the region, and each operates and plans its system independently, with its own funding sources, which makes any uniform change difficult.

Unlike in New York and Boston, where consistent maps and signage aid navigation and a single fare card generally takes riders all over the city, passengers in the Bay Area juggle multiple maps, timetables and a bewildering number of fare combinations, said Randy Rentschler, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the region’s transportation planning and finance agency.

“Nobody would set out to invent the system we have now,” Mr. Rentschler said.

For example, those age 12 and under get a youth discount on the Bay Area Rapid Transit, known as BART, which connects the East Bay, including Berkeley and Oakland, to San Francisco proper, but also goes all the way to San Francisco International Airport. But those age 18 and under get a youth discount on CalTrain, which goes from San Jose and other points in Silicon Valley to San Francisco. CalTrain has zoned fares in six zones, with different fares for each of the six bus companies that are also within its purview. Golden Gate Transit ferries and buses have their own zoned passes. And there are numerous types of passes — monthly, weekly, daily — on different systems.

10 Miles

SOLTRANS

Bus

GOLDEN GATE

TRANSIT

Bus and ferry

TRI DELTA TRANSIT

Bus

Berkeley

Oakland

San Francisco

BAY AREA RAPID

TRANSIT

Rail

Oakland

Int’l. Airport

San Francisco

Int’l. Airport

CALTRAIN

Rail

ALTAMONT COMMUTER EXPRESS

Rail

Mountain

View

Other transit

company routes

San Jose

Pacific Ocean

CALIFORNIA

Gilroy

GOLDEN GATE

TRANSIT

Bus and ferry

SOLTRANS

Bus

TRI DELTA

TRANSIT

Bus

Oakland

San Francisco

BAY AREA

RAPID TRANSIT

Rail

CALTRAIN

Rail

ALTAMONT

COMMUTER

EXPRESS

Rail

San Jose

CALIFORNIA

10 Miles

Not all transit

company routes

are shown

Gilroy

10 Miles

SOLTRANS

Bus

GOLDEN GATE

TRANSIT

Bus and ferry

TRI DELTA TRANSIT

Bus

Berkeley

Oakland

San Francisco

Oakland

Int’l. Airport

BAY AREA

RAPID TRANSIT

Rail

San Francisco

Int’l. Airport

CALTRAIN

Rail

ALTAMONT COMMUTER

EXPRESS

Rail

Mountain

View

Not all transit

company routes

are shown

San Jose

Pacific Ocean

CALIFORNIA

SOURCE: CalTrans

AUG. 1, 2015

By The New York Times

Part of the problem is geography. At the Bay Area’s heart “is an obstacle — the bay,” said Jarrett Walker, a transportation planning and policy consultant who edits the blog HumanTransit.org and has written a book of the same title (Island Press, 2011). “There are three cities that with some justification regard themselves as important centers in their own right,” he said, referring to San Francisco itself, Oakland and San Jose. “People live ‘over the hill’ or ‘across the water.’ There’s a weaker sense of region.”

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency oversees the city proper’s surface transportation network, including bike lanes, public transit, traffic, parking and taxis. But it carries less than half of the region’s trips. Commuters traveling by public transportation from the East Bay to Mountain View or other Silicon Valley locations face a train ride and at least three buses — a connection possible only if everything is on time.

And demand has grown for these services. The traffic lull that occurred after the dot-com bust is long gone. In 2014, drivers wasted an average of 78 hours of delays in traffic, with San Francisco and San Jose ranking among the top five worst cites in the United States for traffic, said Jim Bak, a director of Inrix, a transportation data and analysis company in Kirkland, Wash.

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Ridership on CalTrain is up by 10 percent, for example, “a reflection of the economy and the appeal of San Francisco,” said Art Guzzetti, vice president for policy at the American Public Transportation Association in Washington, D.C.

Still, only about 10 percent of Bay Area commuters take public transportation, Mr. Rentschler said. The ascendance of the so-called Google buses, which ferry workers from various tech companies between far-flung suburban campuses and their neighborhoods in and around San Francisco and have drawn criticism from residents, underscores the need for a more efficient system, according to SPUR.

Even transit operators agree that transfer points like Embarcadero Station in downtown San Francisco “are the places where we should be doubling down,” said Tilly Chang, executive director of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, which oversees long-term planning and administers funding. The authority is working with BART on a rewards program that would coax riders into traveling during nonpeak hours either by offering points on electronic payment cards or luring them with prizes, like coupons from local businesses.

Though certainly preferable to clogged highways, stations like Embarcadero test the mettle of even the most intrepid commuter. There, a transfer from BART to the city’s light rail, known as MUNI, requires negotiating two levels, exiting through a turnstile, paying a new fare, entering another turnstile and descending another flight of stairs to reach a different platform.

“It’s a little intimidating,” said Michael Beadle, 41, who completes that transfer daily in his commute from Castro Valley to his job at Ubisoft, a video game company. “To be honest, I’ve helped many travelers who got lost.”

Two creative citizens took the chaos into their own hands. Jay Primus, a 39-year-old transportation planner, and David Wiggins, a 43-year-old cartographer, were so frustrated by the cluttered 1970s San Francisco transit map that they decided to design their own. Nearly 10 years after they began, after protracted funding travails, they gave the design to the city’s transportation agency, which made it the official system map. It uses thickness and color of lines to connote places where buses run on time and where service is more sporadic.

“A good map can help people understand how transit can serve them,” Mr. Primus said. “It’s not just where does the transit go, but how often it comes and how long might I have to wait?”

A version of this article appears in print on August 2, 2015, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Bay Area’s Disjointed Public Transit Network Inspires a Call for Harmony . Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe